Life goes on

Whatever happens, no matter how crazy, it just does. Took the number 30 bus yesterday, the route that was blown up on Thursday next to Tavistock Square, where this statue of Mahatma Gandhi. Also the memorial to "those who have established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill". Also, I think, a Hiroshima monument and a Peace Tree. It's a real peace park. Junkies come to shoot up there and crack-dealers can rest their feet, sitting on the lush grass. So how ironic it should be the scene of such events. It's all sealed off now. (Later note: Londoners might want to take note you are almost certain to be searched in certain parts of central London, apprently a map of the exclusion zone has been published on the net now, I found it yesterday and can't find it again.)

The nearest eyewitness to the atrocities found by realgem (lazy journalism-wise, you should have realised by now) was about 200 yards away, just around the corner, where he was on his way to work in an unnamed august British institution in the very near vicinity.

There was the explosion, I saw holes and blood on the building beside the bus...

And suddenly police there... There was something strange about how rehearsed it all was... How well organised... Something unreal, wrong about it, about how smoothly they were suddenly there, cutting off the street and steering people away and not letting me past... "We don't see very much of you normally, do we?" I said to the woman copper...

[this comment should be understood in the context of how openly crack dealing goes on in the street in the vicinity, and the number of times our eyewitness has fruitlessly complained about it to the police and local authorities...]

I was happy to see Saturday's Times carried a two-page spread of excerpts from blogs reporting on the bombs and the mood in London... blogs have really come into their own...

And within a few hours of the bombs, you could find people's mobile phone footage of the attacks on the internet... The future is really almost here, the information-saturated Transmet future I'm waiting for...

My good friend the Malung, for example, finds his blog being referenced in the Italian daily La Stampa... See his post about it here and the article on La Stampa's web here... Scroll down to where it says Qualcuno saputo delle accuse ad Al Qaeda parla di Abu Hamza and you will notice it links malung-tv-news...